#FactCheck- Viral Video of ₹500 Notes Found in Floodwater Is Not From Nepal

Executive Summary

A dispute had recently emerged in Kotdwar, Uttarakhand, over the name of a shop. During the controversy, a local youth, Deepak Kumar, came forward in support of the shopkeeper. The incident subsequently became a subject of discussion on social media, with users expressing varied reactions. Meanwhile, a photo began circulating on social media showing a burqa-clad woman presenting a bouquet to Deepak Kumar. The image is being shared with the claim that All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM)’s women’s president, Rubina, welcomed “Mohammad Deepak Kumar” by presenting him with a bouquet. However, research conducted by the CyberPeace found the viral claim to be false. The research  revealed that users are sharing an AI-generated image with a misleading claim.

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Claim:

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On social media platform Instagram, a user shared the viral image claiming that AIMIM’s women’s president Rubina welcomed “Mohammad Deepak Kumar” by presenting him with a bouquet. The link to the post, its archived version, and a screenshot are provided below.

• https://www.instagram.com/p/DUYXj1gCPYZ/ 
• https://archive.ph/92akN 

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Fact Check:

Upon closely examining the viral image, certain inconsistencies raised suspicion that it could be AI-generated. To verify its authenticity, the image was analysed using the AI detection tool Hive Moderation, which indicated a 96 percent probability that the image was AI-generated.

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In the next stage of the research , the image was also analysed using another AI detection tool, Wasit AI, which likewise identified the image as AI-generated.

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Conclusion

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The research  establishes that users are circulating an AI-generated image with a misleading claim linking it to the Kotdwar controversy.

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On 12 August 2026, President Donald Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum titled Expanding Capabilities to Combat Transnational Cyber Enabled Crime. Stripped of its bureaucratic packaging, the document does something American law has resisted for three decades: it lets private companies, under close federal supervision, break into the systems of foreign criminal networks and, in some cases, disrupt or damage them.

That is a genuinely large policy shift, even if the memorandum itself is careful, almost defensive, about how it frames the shift. Understanding why requires separating what the text actually authorizes from the "hack back" headline that has attached itself to the story within days of signing.

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The problem the memo says it is solving

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The White House frames this as a response to scale, not ideology. Americans reported losing more than 20.8 billion dollars to cyber enabled crime in 2025, a sharp jump from the roughly 12.5 billion dollar figure cited when the administration's earlier March 2026 executive order on cybercrime, fraud, and predatory schemes was signed. Ransomware, phishing, financial fraud, sextortion, and impersonation scams sit at the center of that number, and the administration's own supporting material points to a grim detail buried in the numbers: one in seven young people who experienced sextortion as a minor reported harming themselves as a result.

Those crimes, the memorandum argues, are increasingly the work of organized, transnational groups operating from jurisdictions the FBI simply cannot reach. Domestic law enforcement, built for domestic crime, is structurally mismatched to a threat that lives across borders and inside encrypted infrastructure. The administration's answer is to formally recruit the resource it says is best positioned to close that gap: the American cybersecurity industry itself, which the memo describes as "the most innovative and technologically advanced in the world."

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What the Program actually authorizes

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The memorandum directs the National Coordination Center, a body first stood up under a 2025 executive order, to build a formal Program through which vetted Participating Companies can conduct two categories of activity against foreign Cyber Enabled Transnational Criminal Organizations, defined in the text as CE TCOs.

Cyber Surveillance Operations cover unauthorized access to a target's systems for the primary purpose of collecting information or intelligence, undertaken with the intent to remain undetected. Cyber Effects Operations go further: manipulating, disrupting, denying, degrading, or destroying information systems, the infrastructure those systems control, or the data resident on them.

Crucially, CE TCOs are defined narrowly. A foreign group only counts if it targets the US government, US persons, or US interests, and it must not be an institutional arm of a foreign state or wholly directed by one. The memo builds in a presumption of innocence at the state level too: a group is assumed not to be state controlled unless clear intelligence establishes otherwise. That distinction matters enormously, because it is the line meant to separate this Program from anything resembling private warfare against a nation state.

No operation happens unilaterally. Every proposed action must be approved in writing by two Program Executive Directors, one designated by the Attorney General and one by the Secretary of Homeland Security, coordinating with each other before signing off. Participating Companies must pass what the memo calls rigorous vetting, sign contractual agreements with DOJ or DHS, and in many cases post a bond or escrow of at least one million dollars, forfeited if they breach their agreement. Within 60 days of the memo's signing, the Program Executive Directors must publish detailed operating procedures covering everything from target adjudication to what happens if an operation accidentally hits a US person's system, in which case the company must stop, run minimization procedures, and immediately notify the Center.

There is also a hard ceiling built into the design. Operations expected to cause loss of life, serious injury, or conduct that would rise to the level of a use of force or armed attack under international law, termed Critical Outcomes in the text, cannot be approved by the Program Executive Directors at all. That ceiling is the memo's clearest attempt to keep this inside the bounds of law enforcement rather than sliding into something closer to conflict.

Multiple law firms tracking the rollout, including Wiley, have been explicit on one point worth repeating because so much coverage has blurred it: this is not a green light for companies to hack back on their own initiative. Every operation remains, on paper, an act of the federal government, merely executed through a contracted private hand.

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Why experts are not popping champagne

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Legal caution has not stopped a wave of professional anxiety. Cyber policy veterans interviewed by outlets like CyberScoop describe the memo as a genuine philosophical break in how Washington thinks about offense in cyberspace, and the debate that followed split fairly evenly between cautious optimism and open alarm.

The core worry, echoed across nearly every serious critique, is attribution. Cyber operations are hard to trace precisely because criminals exploit shared infrastructure, proxies, and compromised third party systems to hide, and that same fog does not lift just because a government contract sits behind the operator. A former senior CISA official, Michael Garcia, put the risk plainly: pressure to attribute quickly could push companies toward lower certainty judgments about who they are actually striking, with a realistic chance of hitting the wrong server, or worse, infrastructure tied to a foreign government rather than a criminal gang. A former Cyber Command official was blunter still, describing parts of the memo on social media as a structure that could reward companies for manufacturing billable threats rather than resolving them efficiently.

Paul Rosenzweig, a former DHS policy official, raised a separate and arguably more durable problem: jurisdiction. Whatever this memo authorizes under American law, the systems being accessed usually sit inside someone else's sovereign territory, governed by that country's own criminal statutes. Washington cannot legislate away a foreign hacking law simply by calling the American company that broke it a Participating Company.

None of this makes the memo indefensible. Supporters point out, correctly, that the private sector already does enormous amounts of active defense and threat disruption work informally, through botnet takedown litigation and coordinated infrastructure seizures, and that formalizing federal oversight over that activity is arguably safer than the current improvisation. The honest position, and probably the fair one, is that the memo trades one set of risks for another, and which set turns out worse will depend entirely on the operating procedures due inside sixty days, procedures the public has not yet seen.

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CyberPeace Insights: what this means beyond America's borders

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A significant share of the CE-TCO activity this memo is built to target, the ransomware crews, romance investment fraud operations, and sextortion rings running out of Southeast Asia, does not victimize Americans in isolation. The scam compounds clustered along the Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos borders, repeatedly raided over the past two years, have held thousands of trafficked workers of dozens of nationalities, Indians consistently among the largest groups rescued, alongside Chinese, Filipino, and Malaysian nationals. India has run its own repatriation efforts out of Mae Sot in Thailand, bringing citizens home several hundred at a time, and has built its own institutional response to this threat through the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, which coordinates cybercrime enforcement across states and increasingly across borders.

That shared exposure gives India and the United States real common ground here. The criminal infrastructure this American Program is designed to disrupt is, in significant part, the same infrastructure that has trafficked and defrauded Indian citizens, which gives New Delhi genuine reason to watch this experiment closely and constructively. At the same time, the Program's underlying model, private companies conducting cross-border operations under one nation's legal authorization, is a genuinely new template in international cyber governance, and how it performs over its first year will likely shape how other major digital economies, India included, think about calibrating their own frameworks for public-private cooperation against transnational cybercrime. India and other nations should closely watch whether this becomes a template worth adapting or a cautionary tale worth avoiding. 

It is pertinent to note that Justice and Homeland Security departments have 60 days to write detailed operating procedures covering everything from a target-vetting rubric to a classified operational workflow and 180 days to deliver the first status report to the White House.

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References

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1. The White House. "Expanding Capabilities to Combat Transnational Cyber Enabled Crime." 12 August 2026. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/expanding-capabilities-to-combat-transnational-cyber-enabled-crime/
2. Wiley Rein LLP. "Navigating the New Presidential Memorandum on Transnational Cyber Enabled Crime." August 2026. https://www.wiley.law/alert-Navigating-the-New-Presidential-Memorandum-on-Transnational-Cyber-Enabled-Crime
3. SecureWorld. "Trump Memo Lets Private Firms Hack Back at Cybercriminals." August 2026. https://www.secureworld.io/industry-news/trump-authorizes-private-firms-offensive-cyber-operations
4. CyberScoop. "A bold new strategy or a dangerous precedent? Experts are divided on Trump's memo." August 2026. https://cyberscoop.com/private-sector-hacking-presidential-memo-cybersecurity/
5. CyberScoop. "Trump turns to private sector in offensive hacking operations memo." August 2026. https://cyberscoop.com/trump-memo-private-sector-offensive-hacking/
6. CNN Politics. "Cyber privateers: Trump issues order allowing US companies to hack overseas groups under certain conditions." August 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/13/politics/cyber-privateers-trump-order-overseas-groups-hacking
7. NPR. "Trump administration wants to allow companies to hack foreign cybercriminals." August 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/08/15/nx-s1-5930311/trump-companies-hack-foreign-cybercriminals
8. The Next Web. "President Donald Trump signs memo letting US agencies hack transnational crime groups abroad." August 2026. https://thenextweb.com/news/trump-cyber-memo-transnational-crime
9. Machine News. "Security firms hit back at Trump's call to hack back against international crime gangs." August 2026. https://www.machine.news/security-firms-hit-back-at-trumps-call-to-hack-back-against-international-crime-gangs/
10. Lawfare. "Trump Admin Cyber Strategy Centers Private Sector in Offensive Cyber Operations." March 2026. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/trump-admin-cyber-strategy-centers-private-sector-in-offensive-cyber-operations
11. Lawfare. "Partners or Provocateurs? Private Sector Involvement in Offensive Cyber Operations." July 2025. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/partners-or-provocateurs--private-sector-involvement-in-offensive-cyber-operations
12. Global Indian Network. "Pig Butchering Scams in India: The Dark Intersection of Social Media, AI, and Emotional Manipulation." January 2026. https://globalindiannetwork.com/pig-butchering-scams-in-india/
13. The Tribune. "India brings home scammed 549 nationals from Myanmar in 2 days." 2025. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/india/india-brings-home-scammed-549-nationals-from-myanmar-in-2-days
14. Malay Mail. "India to repatriate 500 nationals fleeing Myanmar's cyber scam hub, says Thai PM." October 2025. https://www.malaymail.com/amp/news/world/2025/10/29/india-to-repatriate-500-nationals-fleeing-myanmars-cyber-scam-hub-says-thai-pm/196399
15. NBC News. "260 foreigners rescued from virtual slavery in Myanmar's online scam centers are being repatriated." 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/260-foreigners-rescued-virtual-slavery-myanmars-online-scam-centers-ar-rcna192180
16. CyberPeace Foundation. "About Us." https://cyberpeace.org/about-us
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Contributors

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1. Maj. Vineet Kumar, Founder & Global President, CyberPeace
2. Mr. Neeraj Soni, Senior Research Analyst, Policy & Advocacy, CyberPeace

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List of Abbreviations 

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1. CE‑TCO — Cyber Enabled Transnational Criminal Organization
2. DOJ — Department of Justice
3. DHS — Department of Homeland Security
4. FBI — Federal Bureau of Investigation
5. CISA — Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
6. I4C — Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre
7. US — United States
8. IT — Information Technology

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The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, operationalises data privacy largely through a consent management framework. It aims to give data principles, ie, individuals, control over their personal data by giving them the power to track, change, and withdraw their consent from its processing. However, in practice, consent management is often not straightforward. For example, people may be frequently bombarded with requests, which can lead to fatigue and eventual overlooking of consent requests. This article discusses the way consent management is handled by the DPDP Act, and looks at how India can design the system to genuinely empower users while holding organisations accountable.

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Consent Management in the DPDP Act

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According to the DPDP Act, consent must be unambiguous, free, specific, and informed. It must also be easy for people to revoke their consent (DPO India, 2023). To this end, the Act creates Consent Managers- registered middlemen- who serve as a link between users and data custodians. 

The purpose of consent managers is to streamline and centralise the consent procedure. Users can view, grant, update, or revoke consent across various platforms using the dashboards they offer. They hope to improve transparency and lessen the strain on people to keep track of permissions across different services by standardising the way consent is presented (IAPP, 2024).

The Act draws inspiration from international frameworks such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), mandating that Indian users be provided with a single platform to manage permissions rather than having to deal with dispersed consent prompts from every service.

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The Challenges 

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Despite the mandate for an interoperable platform for consent management, several key challenges emerge. There is a lack of clarity on how consent management will be operationalised. This creates challenges of accountability and implementation.  Thus, : 

1. If the interface is poorly designed,  users could be bombarded with content permissions from apps/platforms/ services that are not fully compliant with the platform. 
2. If consent notices are vague, frequent, lengthy, or complex, users may continue to grant permissions without meaningful engagement. 
3. It leaves scope for data fiduciaries to use dark patterns to coerce customers into granting consent through poor UI/UX design.
4. The lack of clear, standardised interoperability protocols across sectors could lead to a fragmented system, undermining the goal of a single, easy-to-use platform.
5. Consent fatigue could easily appear in India's digital ecosystem, where apps, e-commerce websites, and government services all ask for permissions from over 950 million internet subscribers. Experiences from GDPR countries show that users who are repeatedly prompted eventually become banner blind, which causes them to ignore notices entirely.
6. Low levels of literacy (including digital literacy) and unequal access to digital devices among women and marginalised communities create complexities in the substantive coverage of privacy rights.  
7. Placing the burden of verification of legal guardianship for children and persons with disabilities (PwDs) on data fiduciaries might be ineffective, as SMEs may lack the resources to undertake this activity. This could create new forms of vulnerability for the two groups. 

Legal experts claim that this results in what they refer to as a legal fiction, wherein consent is treated as valid by the law despite the fact that it does not represent true understanding or choice (Lawvs, 2023). Additionally, research indicates that users hardly ever read privacy policies in their entirety. People are very likely to tick boxes without fully understanding what they are agreeing to. By drastically limiting user control, this has a bearing on the privacy rights of Indian citizens and residents.  (IJLLR, 2023).

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Impacts of Weak Consent Management:

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According to the Indian Journal of Law and Technology, in an era of asymmetry and information overload, privacy cannot be sufficiently protected by relying only on consent (IJLT, 2023). Almost every individual will be impacted by inadequate consent management.

1. For Users: True autonomy is replaced by the appearance of control. Individuals may unintentionally disclose private information, which undermines confidence in digital services.
2. For Businesses: Compliance could become a mere formality. Further, if acquired consent is found to be manipulated or invalid, it creates space for legal risks and reputational damage. 
3. For Regulators: It becomes difficult to oversee a system where consent is frequently disregarded or misinterpreted. When consent is merely formal, the law's promise to protect personal information is undermined.

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Way Forward

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1. Layered and Simplified Notices: Simple language and layers of visual cues should be used in consent requests. Important details like the type of data being gathered, its intended use, and its duration should be made clear up front. Additional explanations are available for users who would like more information. This method enhances comprehension and lessens cognitive overload (Lawvs, 2023).
2. Effective Dashboards: Dashboards from consent managers should be user-friendly, cross-platform, and multilingual. Management is made simple by features like alerts, one-click withdrawal or modification, and summaries of active permissions. The system is more predictable and dependable when all services use the same format, which also reduces confusion (IAPP, 2024). 
3. Dynamic and Contextual Consent: Instead of appearing as generic pop-ups, consent requests should show up when they are pertinent to a user's actions. Users can make well-informed decisions without feeling overburdened by subtle cues, such as emphasising risks when sensitive data is requested (IJLLR, 2023). 
4. Accountability of Consent Managers: Organisations that offer consent management services must be accountable and independent, through clear certification, auditing, and specific legal accountability frameworks. Even when formal consent is given, strong trustee accountability guarantees that data is not misused (IJLT, 2023).
5. Complementary Protections Beyond Consent: Consent continues to be crucial, but some high-risk data processing might call for extra protections. These may consist of increased responsibilities for fiduciaries or proportionality checks. These steps improve people's general protection and lessen the need for frequent consent requests (IJLLR, 2023).

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Conclusion

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The core of the DPDP Act is to empower users to have control over their data through measures such as consent management. But requesting consent is insufficient; the system must make it simple for people to manage, monitor, and change it. Effectively designed, managed, and executed consent management has the potential to revolutionise user experience and trust in India's digital ecosystem if it is implemented carefully.To make consent management genuinely meaningful, it is imperative to standardise procedures, hold fiduciaries accountable, simplify interfaces, and investigate supplementary protections.

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References

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Building Trust with Technology: Consent Management Under India’s DPDP Act, 2023

Consent Fatigue and Data Protection Laws: Is ‘Informed Consent’ a Legal Fiction

Beyond Consent: Enhancing India's Digital Personal Data Protection Framework

Constitutional Implications Of Consent Fatigue In Data Protection: Rethinking Meaningful Consent In The Indian Context 

Top 10 operational impacts of India’s DPDPA – Consent management

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